Palestinian Authority’s gerontocratic succession crisis exposes Fatah’s institutional decay and regional power vacuums
Original framing: “Palestinian President Abbas casts vote in decisive Fatah elections” — Al Jazeera
Women in Fatah are systematically excluded from leadership roles, with only 5% of the Central Committee being female, despite their central role in the First Intifada. Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan, who constitute 40% of the Palestinian population, are entirely disenfranchised in these elections, reinforcing the Oslo Accords’ exclusion of diaspora rights. Youth-led factions like Fatah’s *Shabiba* movement are sidelined, with their demands for anti-corruption and democratic reform ignored by the aging elite.
The Fatah succession crisis is not merely a generational power struggle but a symptom of a deeper systemic failure: the collapse of Palestinian political institutions under the weight of settler-colonial occupation, neoliberal aid dependency, and authoritarian consolidation.
The aging elite’s grip on power mirrors post-colonial liberation movements globally, where revolutionary parties ossify into ruling classes, eroding their original mandate. Indigenous Palestinian governance traditions, once rooted in *shura* and communal consensus, have been replaced by a bureaucratic elite disconnected from the people, a pattern seen in other colonized contexts from Algeria to Lebanon. The solution lies not in replacing Abbas with another strongman but in dismantling the gerontocratic structures that have hollowed out Palestinian self-determination, while reviving Indigenous and youth-led models of governance that can withstand the pressures of occupation and donor interference. The trickster’s laughter—whether in hip-hop satire or Eshu’s chaos—exposes the absurdity of a system that claims legitimacy while excluding the very people it purports to represent.